


low magic

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, Sex as Magic, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 12:33:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6519880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brothers make myth. Rowena makes life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	low magic

Dirty work. Women's work. Rowena in the field, far out in the dark past the village where her pitiful fledgling coven met its end, alone in the sea of black sweeping grass and the stars and the moon, feeling the cold on her naked skin. Everything she needs resting in the earth between her knees. Her naked knees, swells of pale flesh and pale bone. Her hands like white spiders working in the dirt. Pulling, plucking, winding, twisting: mistletoe, angelica, slivers of ash, splinters of birch, elderberries bursting in her fingers like seeds of blood. Staining her fingers, staining the grass. Strands of her own hair, yanked into knots.

 

Ahead, the old mound, the low opening in the earth. An old tomb no one will touch. Its great mouth yawning somewhere further up the valley. Behind her, she can feel it, its presence, reaching up, the last standing stone in this part of the country, not yet knocked down. And her in between, Rowena in the field with dirty hands.

 

A long time ago words meant more to her. Now with the heavy pregnant moon almost full overhead and the night yawning in between the hole in the ground and the stone at her back she doesn't need them. Everything she needs resting low in her, close to the base of her spine. She hums instead, whatever vibration she feels coming up through the ground.

 

She spits into the bundle of leaves and wood, no bigger around than her thumb. Reaches down and swipes a finger across the inside of her thigh, smears her monthly blood across both shards of wood, ash and birch. Holds it close between her breasts. Looks ahead to where the tomb gapes open, where it must be.

 

If she shakes, it's only the wind.

* * *

 

_Dirty work. Clean-up for someone else. Sam can't stop thinking about it, can't stop his hands from trembling. His jeans are ruined, stiff with other people's blood, and Dean's hand keeps brushing against them where he walks beside him._

 

_They left their knives back in the clearing, hidden under dead leaves, impossible to find unless someone were to go kicking around looking. They left the bodies, too, frozen where they fell: sixteen witches, men and women. By the time they got there the girl they'd stolen away was dead, and her baby was, too, and Dean—well, Dean—_

 

_It's a long way out of the woods with so much blood on their hands, their clothes, sticky on their boots. Dean grabs Sam's hand to pull him up an incline. At the top they rest their feet between reaching roots and huddle over Dean's compass in the absolute night, but it spins without stopping._

 

_Find our way out in daylight, Dean says. The car's not far._

 

_Every part of Sam is trembling. His hands, his ribs._

 

_Dean pauses, turns half-back to him. Reaches out to push a wet strand of hair behind Sam's ear. It's all good, Sammy, he says. And it is._

 

_Sam doesn't like to kill witches, and he said as much before they set out into the trees. But after what they saw, he didn't mind it all so much. His heart is pumping hard and steady._

 

_No one will come to look for them. The coven, that is. They made sure of that. Someday someone will find their bones._

 

_Sam watches Dean push through the hanging branches, the leaning grass, spiderwebs disturbed, and follows carefully where he places his feet. He's never seen anyone kill the way Dean killed tonight. Now out of it, the clearing and the fire and the bodies, he has a picture stuck in his brain, Dean savage and ruthless. His heart is pumping hard._

* * *

 

It's important to let the world know what you're going to do: she tells the moon, the tomb, the stone, showing her handiwork. It's starting to come alive in her hands. She doesn't have long.

 

Rowena in the field with dirty white hands, stained with elderberry juice and her own blood, a strand of her long red hair stuck where it's congealing. Digs her fingers into the dirt where it's cool and damp, kisses the earth.

 

She doesn't let herself brace but pierces the skin of her thigh, gripping her little knife hard, lets the blade find purchase, drags it up, separating skin like butter. Feels the wind lift, it's dark and wet on her skin. Angles the knife, skin pulled from muscle: a pocket of flesh as big across as her thumb.

 

Her fingers are bloody and slick and they push the spell beneath her skin, all the way in, disappearing to the knuckle, picking up splinters, leaves of mistletoe sticking and coming away. It hurts, it hurts, but she breathes through her nose, feeling her heart shuddering in her breast.

 

Rowena pulling the skin closed over it, a lump like a cancer in her leg. She spits on it, pinches dirt from the heavy earth beneath her and draws a line with it, over the edge of the wound.

 

Life, death, life. Low magic, all things considered: spittle and woman's blood, moon and earth magic, knelt between the phallus and the womb like every other worthful witch that ever knew how to cast a real spell, so she breathes, waits for the wound to seal, draws her dirty thumb down across her face.

 

Some sell their souls for the power she has; all of them, she's found, end bloody and in pain.

 

Rowena in the field, she looks down to find her flesh whole, her skin smooth, and only the hum of angelica and ash inside her leg for a sign that anything happened here at all.

* * *

 

_What happens has to happen, in ways they can never quite put their fingers on. Sitting outside the car, flush on the ground, alone except for one another and the night-bugs in the trees: cleaning blood from one another's faces by flashlight, unbuttoning shirts to look for scratches and gashes they've missed. Of course they kiss. Their bodies are sources of heat and the woods are cold, and Dean was fierce back there, his eyes blank and fiery, and Sam can't stop looking for them in his face. No matter how deep and how long he kisses him he can still taste witch in his brother's mouth._

 

_On his back, and Dean leaving witch-blood like lipstick prints down his chest, down his stomach, and Sam sinking into the dirt carving furrows with his shoulder blades, pushing his throat up toward the canopy of leaves and the moon past. It's not the time, but it's never the time. His heart is pumping hard, steady, hot and good, Dean hot and good and solid up against him._

 

_There was always something raw and strange about them, Sam has always thought, a meaning, age to the interlocking of their legs. Dean makes him think of twins and myths and fed-by-wolves, founding living cities. Low magic in it, something base, something pleasing to dead gods in old places._

 

_His hand falls out, rolls, crushes something caught beneath the wheel of the car beside his head, something that smells sweet, something with white petals._

 

_Feels like his breath could fill the forest. Dean's mouth like the heat of the sun. Far overhead trees twisting, bowing, and stars going out, and the moon rippling through her phases, and the sharp sweet smell of berries burst and blood in his mouth and on his mouth and on their mouths, a hundred mouths. A hundred trees and their roots like cradles._

 

_So they carry a little witchcraft in them, maybe. Brothercraft, god offerings, reaching back, sacrifice, fertility and copper—sex, blood, low magic. All allowed—_

* * *

 

She tells no one.

* * *

 

_They tell no one._

* * *

 

Yesterday afternoon they burned six, and she watched. She couldn't do anything but watch. They were all hers, the youngest thirteen, all hers and all foolish: more interested in love and petty revenge than the things she wanted to teach them. The real things.

 

She's no love lost for the smoldering skeletons still heaped in the center of town, truly. She knew before she started with them that they were lost causes. But she had hoped.

 

She, of course, has never drawn suspicion. Not the right kind. And even if she had—in the moldering dark she would have stood, brushed the ash from her body, walked away on her scarred right leg.

 

Every day they burn them, ignorant sisters, while she passes by. The further south she moves, it seems, the worse it gets.

 


End file.
